Because there is a new Marilynne Robinson novel, there is a new Marilynne Robinson profile in the New York Times.
I think you should all read it. Robinson is so perfect, as a writer, that I often postpone reading her new books (oh, speaking of: buy Housekeeping, buy Gilead, buy Home, make some tea, adopt some cats, acquire a cloak and a house in the woods, live a different kind of life and be a more thoughtful person) because of the knowledge, gained over time, that they will sideline me for weeks, not with the usual envy one can experience in the contemplation of a writer who is truly a Genius Who Walks Among Us, but also because she interferes with my ability to muddle along.
Look at this (emphasis mine):
I mentioned a phrase she once used to describe what it felt like to have been her mother’s daughter
“I remember it — ‘regally mothered’ — my mother certainly remembered it and was certainly not pleased.”
I asked what her mother had taken it to mean.
“Not a television mother,” Robinson replied. “There was something about her. Her body language. A kind of aesthetic dignity she never forgot. She never relaxed away from it, even as a mother. When I say that people are too poorly suited to life in the world for this to be the definitive human condition, my mother is a very good instance of that, and my father is equally.”
….
WHEN I SAY THAT PEOPLE ARE TOO POORLY SUITED TO LIFE IN THE WORLD FOR THIS TO BE THE DEFINITIVE HUMAN CONDITION.
…
they are just chilling, waiting to be brought food in a restaurant, and Robinson is like “look at us all, miserable and alone, stumbling along, so there has to be something else.”
…
…
oh wow
…
now i kind of think that people are too poorly suited to life in this world for this to be the definitive human condition
…
OR NOT? I don’t know. But I definitely know, and just said histrionically on Twitter, that if I could write like Marilynne Robinson, I would believe in God too.
Tags: books, immortal geniuses, marilynne robinson, writers, writing
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True story: Gilead was assigned in my senior english seminar and I never finished it because I just couldn’t bring myself to read it fast enough to make the deadline. It is the only book I ever didn’t finish because it was too good.
I feel the same way about Gilead! And my mom did the same thing with Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She took years and years to read it because she was so afraid of missing something beautiful.
Pilgrim at TINKER CREEK. I love that book ardently, painfully.
Oh god yes.
I feel so strongly about it and yet I’m not sure if I’ve ever read all the way to the end.
I just return to it again and again.
I would like to withdraw my earlier statement, Gilead and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek are the only books I didn’t finish because they were too good.
I finished it after maybe a month of two- or three-page reads. It kept feeling like I’d been hit in the stomach by something huge and wonderful, and I’d have to stagger off and deal with my pathetic scrabbling soul until I was able to face reading more. It was like staring at the rising sun.
“In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable–which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.”
Oh, wow.
Oh, OH, I found the part that hooked me like a gasping fish when I read the excerpt in the New Yorker:
“At first I thought I saw the sun setting in the east . . . .Then I realized that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them. I wanted my father to see it, but I knew I’d have to startle him out of his prayer, and I wanted to do it the best way, so I took his hand and kissed it. And then I said, ‘Look at the moon.’ And he did. We just stood there until the sun was down and the moon was up. They seemed to float on the horizon for quite a long time, I suppose because they were both so bright you couldn’t get a clear look at them. And that grave, and my father and I, were exactly between them, which seemed amazing to me at the time, since I hadn’t given much thought to the nature of the horizon. My father said, ‘I would never have thought this place could be beautiful. I’m glad to know that.’”
Don’t mind me, the fetal position is very comfortable here on the floor.
One doesn’t expect to break out sobbing at work, standing in front of the monitor, reading comments at the Toast.
I’m in this place right now with “Hild.” I’ll read a few pages and just be like “GOD THIS FUCKING BOOK HOW, I AM NOT SMART ENOUGH TO READ THIS” and get too overwhelmed and have to put it down for awhile.
GILEAD IS THE GREATEST BOOK ABOUT CHRISTIANITY SINCE THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS BAR FUCKING NONE
gileadddddddd
I’ve been spending the last month pretty much binge-reading everything you’ve written here, Mallory, and somehow this is totally the best and truest thing you’ve said.
“It [love] makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?”
Dead.
MARILYNNE ROBINSON, PUNCHING US RIGHT IN THE FEELS.
YES. This is all the true.
Also, it’s a very good book on the civil war.
“I’m trying to tell you things I might never have thought to tell you if I had brought you up myself, father and son, in the usual companionable way. When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all.”
GILEAD. MOTHERFUCKER.
Oh man, every word of hers is perfect and demands savoring. It makes me happy that she’s in the world, and reading her helps bolster my faith, both in God and in the awesome potential of other people.
I read Gilead and then promptly bought my own copy and copies for a bunch of people at Christmas. I haven’t returned to it because I don’t think my poor mortal heart could take it again. I remember awkwardly typing paragraph-long quotes out on my tiny little enV to post to Tumblr.
Whenever I’m reading a Marilynne Robinson book, I mostly believe in God and I have like sense memories of what real religion feels like to my body and AUGH I’m going to buy the hell out of this new book.
My first thought, upon realizing that there’s a new Robinson out – “I can’t read that until I have about a week of uninterrupted time in which to be a fragile mes. Oh God my life is such that I have to schedule a week to be a fragile mess.” THE BOOK WASN’T EVEN OUT YET HOW DID SHE DO THAT.
So if I’ve never read Marilynne Robinson before and don’t usually go for family dramas or emotional realism, which book should I start with?
Gilead. It’s the gentlest, most luminous book imaginable.
YES
I had to read Gilead for a class in university, ad then she CAME TO MY SCHOOL and gave a lecture and signed my book and she is THE BEST, Her and Annie Dillard an Madeleine LEngle are FLAWLESS.
In conclusion I will read this book slowly and intently and then reread it seventy times seven
Oh is Lila about THE Lila in Gilead? Of course it must be! I love Gilead so very much, and Home a close second. And Housekeeping is just heartbreaking.
I read Gilead in one go, in the back of the car as my parents drove home from Wisconsin, where we’d just seen my grandmother for the last time before she died.
I think this was the perfect way for me to read it.
I have two cabinets full of teas, three cats, and two floor length cloaks already. And I live in a house in the woods. I’m in! I will read ALL OF THEM.
Which one should I read first?
FWIW, Gilead does a really good job of explaining the theology behind it. The narrator is a well-read small town minister, which means that Robinson has a vehicle for introducing the reader to complex theology in understandable terms. So, if you know a lot about Protestant Christianity you might get more out of the book, but if you don’t that’s no impediment to enjoying it.
On a tangential note, I have a professor who is basically Rev. Ames from Gilead IRL.
HE IS AMAZING AND I WANT HIM AND HIS WIFE TO ADOPT ME.
I was about six pages into Gilead when John Ames’s son puts the honeysuckle to his lips and has him take his medicine and it was so overwhelmingly beautiful and painful that I had to go lay down in my room. I believe that might actually qualify as having a swoon.
I am seriously considering checking myself into a hotel room with a brand new copy of Lila and reading it there in total solitude.
Now I pretty much want to quit all my things and just sit here with Marilynne Robinson books. She is so amazing and one of the few writers I just sit and read the same sentences over and over. I am so excited there is a new one. I can’t even wait to read it.
Now I pretty much want to quit all my things and just sit here with Marilynne Robinson books. She is so amazing and one of the few writers I just sit and read the same sentences over and over. I am so excited there is a new one. I can't even wait to read it.
Can we please talk about the absolute definitive beauty that is Housekeeping?
People having a conversation about how amazing Marilynne Robinson is makes up for essentially all of the negative garbage on the internet this week. ‘Gilead’ is amazing, but my absolute favorite is ‘Housekeeping.’ Whenever I start to really like someone I loan them my copy. It’s like a creepy literary friendship test. Had to read it a couple of pages at a time, because how can you not just TAKE A CIGARETTE BREAK after reading something like this description of Sylvie’s house?
“I knew what that silence meant, and so did Lucille. It meant that on an evening so calm, so iridescently blue, with the chink and chafe of insects and fat old dogs dragging their chains and belling in the neighbors’ dooryards—in such a boundless and luminous evening, we would feel our proximity with our finer senses. As for example, one of two, lying in a dark room, knows when the other is awake.”
A professor of mine once told a story about seeing her read, in which the person introducing her called ‘Gilead’ “a near-perfect novel,” thinking of this as the highest praise, and when she got onstage she asked “what didn’t you like about it?” Drop the mic.
Gilead is superb
Yeah! Housekeeping!! Definitely my favorite.
I loved Gilead, hated Housekeeping, and don’t understand what “When I say that people are too poorly suited to life in the world for this to be the definitive human condition, my mother is a very good instance of that, and my father is equally” means. Gin!
I just finished “Housekeeping” and holy cow just sit with me while I give you my favorite quotes:
“The most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind.”
and this one, which hit me right in the heart:
“Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside you can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, ‘Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it.’ Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness that lonely people covet and admire.”